Welcome to the fourth annual year in review post for Lockedown Design & SEO! I like year in review posts, because it forces you to take a step back and evaluate what you’ve actually accomplished. Publishing your progress each year allows you to see things in a larger perspective. We have a tendency to get […]
2016 Year in Review
Know Your Customers for SEO
Customer personas are a huge part of planning content for your website. If you know your customers, and get inside their head, you can provide the answers that they’re looking for. After all, what is SEO worth if it’s not providing answers for questions your customers are asking? If you know who your customers are, […]
Businesses Should Own Their WordPress Plugin Licenses
Today we’re discussing one specific scenario that that hurts business websites. This is when WordPress website owners don’t own the plugin licenses for their site. For those of you who don’t know what that is, many CMS like WordPress have “plugins” that extend the core site functionality. Some plugins are free, and some are paid. […]
Web Design Discovery Helps Solve Business Problems
The biggest opportunity for most web developers is actually assessing the business problem that needs to be solved. A scenario I keep observing in the web industry is focusing too much on the technology and not enough on the business problem. This scenario plays out in different ways, but usually with newer developers, or fledgling […]
Should You Join Your Local Chamber of Commerce?
Every business day this week in Sacramento, all the local Chambers are organizing crossover events designing to help small businesses. I attended a function last night where there were six or seven chambers in attendance. I even got interviewed for a promotional video being out together to encourage membership. Later this week I’ll be attending […]
Offline And Online Marketing Are Both Important
As a business owner, you always want more people to walk through your doors to buy what you’re selling. The key to that nowadays is to continually focus on online marketing and face-to-face meetings that happen offline. Most sales reps or business owners can close the deal if they meet you face-to-face. But this isn’t […]
Trust Is The Key To Great Web Design Projects
Web design and development is a curious industry. A lot of people would say that we deal in design. Or code. Or graphics. Or marketing. These are merely by-products of what we deal in. They are not the products themselves. Web agencies only have a few things that they sell: their relationship with the client, […]
Why You Don’t Need Business Network Referral Groups
In every city in America there’s at least one business network referral group or BNI-style club. These are where business owners get together and refer leads to each other. Membership is usually paid, and restricted to one type of each business per group (so there’s no competition). Regular meetings in these groups are usually mandatory, […]
Who Is Your Perfect Customer?
Who is your perfect customer? Do you know them when you see them? Developing customer personas is an important part of your marketing strategy. Sometimes we ask businesses who they are targeting with their products. Occasionally, the answer sounds something like this: “men and women, 18 to 100 years old, all demographics — basically everyone”. […]
Planning For Client Training
Well-organized web development projects follow sequential stages: discovery & research, design, development, testing, launch. But there’s a step that occurs before a new site launch that deserves it’s own attention — and that’s training. Training clients to use their website is an incredibly important project stage. Here’s why. We could build the most beautiful website […]